Two of the most shocking cases involved young women who have had little media experience or exposure. One was invited to speak on climate change at a suburban library. Her brief was simple – talk about everyday things people can do to cut their carbon footprint, talk about climate books available at the library (list provided), leave time for questions, and mingle afterwards. The other woman was asked by a local newspaper to pose with her young children for a photograph to illustrate an article promoting a community tree-planting event. She was briefly quoted as saying planting trees could help mitigate climate change. Two days after the article appeared, she received emails containing threats of sexual assault and violence against her children.

As for the woman speaking at the library, her car windscreen was smeared with excrement – animal or human, does it matter? – and the words ”climate turd” written (also in excrement) across the car bonnet. Proof perhaps, of a climate dissenter with a Freudian complex indicating arrested development.

Beeby is addressing the issue because of some pushback from the global-waming denial crew. In what just must have been a coincidence, the Daily Telegraph, where Tim Blair is opinion editor, had this deceitful story, arguing that because there had been a threat five years ago, there had been no recent threats. If that seems logical to you, you are probably a reporter at the Daily Telegraph. Beeby comments:

Have the threats abated? Not according to the majority of scientists we contacted. Two weeks ago, when ANU economist Professor Ross Garnaut published the final report in his climate update, many scientists said their computers and mobile phones were flooded with spam emails and texts, many abusive or defamatory.

And that’s how we came across the story. There was no ”exquisitely timed” release of information as claimed by one climate sceptic’s blog. There was no conspiracy, rather it was just a chance catch-up call that yielded an unexpected result. We rang a contact (an ecologist) on his landline as he was furiously – in both senses of the word – deleting spam from his mobile.

The dodgy article in the Telegraph prompted Sophie Mirabella, Shadow Science Minister to came out with this media release:

The apparently false allegation of death threats have diminished the individuals involved and reflect poorly on the scientific community.

Beeby:

False allegation? Who did she speak to? Apparently not the climate scientist who has been advised by state police to install a panic button in his office after receiving death threats. Or to the scientist who had his house vandalised (hence police advice to install video surveillance), or the researcher who received an email, with a marksman’s target superimposed on his photo. Sorry Sophie, none of this behaviour is acceptable.

The unpleasant reality is several universities across Australia have been forced to upgrade security to protect scientists. This has ranged from deleting phone numbers from websites and removing names from faculty notice boards, to installing multiple card-swipe entries, office doors protected by punch-in codes, and moving researchers to areas with secure lifts.

I think that the Shadow Minister for Science could benefit from actually talking to scientists — readers can contact her here.

81
….A f-cking piece of garbage like you deserves nothing but abuse. The catastrophe to come is on the heads of scum like you.

83 …

87 …

Bolt knows full well that nothing in my post incited or encouraged abuse or threats. And that the comments were not threats, but abuse. And that they were not just abuse but part of an exchange with another poster who insisted that the scientists were obviously wrong about the Great Barrier Reef because he’d been there and it was doing fine. This is nothing at all like a climate scientist getting threated or abused for doing his job.

But perhaps, Tim, you and your mates in the Piers Boltbrechtson Hivemind, rather than characterising this rhetorical violence as no big deal, could actually try and calm the nutters down a bit.
Tell them to stop being such nutters.
Because sometimes the nutters get off the leash. Then all of a sudden you got barking maddies everywhere, up in people’s faces, snarling and roaring and throwing off phlegm storms of dudgeon that piles up so high you could climb it to look down on the ash clouds that grounded all the flights into Melbourne this week. And sometimes genuine nutters, they take things a bit too far, don’t they? The extreme left in the 1970s? The Red Brigades? The Baader Meinhoff Group? They didn’t start out as violent crazies. They got there step by step, encouraged by rhetoric that grew increasingly radical and violent the further the emergent terrorists got from their origins in the lentil-loving New Left of the 1960s.

Comments

I know Ben, who is a fine scientist, under extra-science attack for 15 years for doing science, and one of the mildest guys I know, but even he gets peeved on occasion. Having enough threats to be assigned security guards isn’t fun either.

Also, having somebody in a Hummer leave an eviscerated rat on your doorstep so your kid is afraid in his own home tends to get even the mildest of guys riled.

You seem to be right with that Hummer driver and the folks like Heartland who help cigarette companies addict children, and stir up as much hatred of climate scientists as they can.
You’re wise to be anonymous. KILLFILE.

Youitou: Catallaxy has always been the goto blog for the local denialist scum. No response to propaganda necessary.
GSW: That you keep coming back suggests that this whole thread has you well and truly torqued. There is no ‘opt” on this: You and your denialist fellow travellers are scum. You are part of a large, angry and desperate right wing push, funded by such disgusting people as the Koch brothers, and aimed squarely at promoting the interests of the oil, coal and mining industries and their propaganda apparatchiks. The science is against you, as are the scientists, and those of us who identify with them and support them, so you troll blogs like Deltoid in the hope of afflicting us with your bullshit. You get your arse handed to you so regularly that there has to be some reason for you hanging around. That must be either gelt, or pathology such as that well characterised by FrankD. Bugger off you bipedal cane toad.

Meg and Bluerock…. so how many people DID die from Chernobyl? If you want people to listen to the IPCC then you should pay more respect to the figures Monbiot uses. If we want people to respect science on climate change, well then we cant be selective about the science we choose to believe over propaganda.

You can go away having satisfied yourself you have ‘won’ against those nasty science types by successfully distracting them. This shows the superority of your ideology against that of the use of debate.

You will have a good and satisfying times down the pub tomorrow evening when you can stand at the bar, puffing out your chest, and regaling those present with how you bested those who look at data saying, “I showed ‘em I did, I showed them scientists who are out to mess with our brains. They can’t fool me I’m smarter than they are, I used english on them” It should be very satisfying for you, you will get some approval from various types, for a little while at least, heavens it might even get you laid!

Now run along, its time for you to sit cross legged in front of the TV to watch Bolt on Gina Reinhart’s Channel 10.

GSW,re-read #89,you seem uncomprehending. Expressing your temptation to a colleague about what you’d rhetorically like to do to a third party is not actually making a threat to that party. Now go away.

In between games of “Spot the Obvious Troll” with the obvious troll, we should note how the MSM have shut down this story. As far as I can tell, the media have simply dropped this down the memory hole, preferring to focus on three year old stories about women harmed by their swimwear, the pashing couple in the middle of the ‘Nucks riot in Vancouver and other such earth-shattering nonsense. I know the MSM defines “superficial” these days, but I still shake my head

Although, in searching the interwebs to see if anyone was still carrying this, I did find another reason to throw up a bit in my mouth at Rowan Dean’s dribble. His vacuous gushing on the Gruen Transfer is bad enough, but he’s even worse when his paymasters slip the leash and give him a whole opinion column. The overexcited widdling of a aged dog is deeper and less odourous…

Are you sure it’s just the mainstream media? It’s the same problem at (say) Climate Progress, although for a different reason. The top headlines as of writing are

1. Daddy, could we have our planet back now? (19 Jun)
2. Jared Diamond Video: With Climate Change, Americans Have Unique Chance to Avoid the Fate of Ancient Maya (19 Jun)
3. Dealing with the Aquaculture Dilemma (19 Jun)
4. “Crappy Headline” Ruins New York Times Story on Link Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather (18 Jun)
5. International Solar Day Open Thread: Should Solar Panel Recycling be Mandatory? (18 Jun)
6. Re-Imagining Agriculture: How to Raise Yields while Reducing CO2 Emissions (18 Jun)
7. Paul Ryan And His Family To Benefit From The $45 Billion In Subsidies For Big Oil In His Budget (17 Jun)
8. North Carolina Republicans Push Back Against Decades of Environmental Progress (17 Jun)
9. Celebrate International Solar Day! (17 Jun)
10. June 17 news: The Benefit of Limiting Black Carbon; U.N. Climate Talks Make Scant Progress to Save Kyoto (17 Jun)

… Nope, nothing on death threats there. It’s as if we’re supposed to be angry at a lot of things, but we’re not allowed to be angry at any one thing for more than 24 hours, after which the next piece of outrageous news comes along and we’re supposed to be angry at that, and then after another 24 hours we’re supposed to be angry at yet another thing, and so on…

The blogosphere is just a big place, but I’d be blessed if I can find more than a handful of bloggers who’s willing to do long-term investigative work for a few stories at a time. You know, bloggers like Deep Climate, who find one big story and keep digging, digging, and digging at it for months on end.

I was just browsing this thread out of curiosity, and I saw about Googling “Santer beat the crap”. It was alleged to be a literal threat, but apparently it instead just a metaphor for someone beating someone else in a debate, am I right? At we see “Dr. Santer beat the crap out of him with the truth” and similar elsewhere. GSW, did you know that? If so, you were disingenuous.

BTW even anti-AGW hero Lubos Motl admits that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, he just says the forcing factor (the extra effect) is not there so all we’ll get is the direct extra wattage from direct absorption. Not even their own real scientists say there’s no AGW.

NeilB: As I’m sure you are aware, Motl is a mathematician with expertise in string theory, not a scientist. That he is also a reactionary Czech nutter is central to our collective points. BTW GSW, your ; ) tic, when pwned, is a bit of a tell. There are some effective treatments for Tourette’s.

No its more like “you will probably plummet to your death whilst getting out of bed in the morning” alarmist.

Ah good. I’m not classified as an AGW alarmist then, even though I understand the fact that it’s happening, and that there will most likely be significant consequences over time, and that many of these are probably going to be undesirable, and that we should get off our collective arses and do something about it rather than just pretending it doesn’t exist, ostrich style.

Why should anyone take seriously the people pushing anthropogenic global warming (or is it the more artful ‘global climate change’ now) when the evidence, under the most generous interpretation, is equivocal?

The narrative that accompanied the ‘death threats’ some have gotten so exercised about was intentionally false. That it was accepted uncritically by those deeming themselves ‘scientists’ does nothing to boost their credibility . . . and much to diminish it further.

Bill: I’m glad Anna-Maria Arabia uses the correct term: climate deniers. This is what GSW, VincentR and the rest of the Trolls hate most – accuracy and public recognition that they are partisan propagandists like Blair, Bolt, Minchin, Monckton, and the Lavoisier/Quadrant cabal.

Sorry guys, all that psycho-babble on this thread and the previous, related one (I thought Freud was out, but I guess he’s made a “climate turd” come-back) has finally piqued my curiosity.

I can see that “psych majors” abound in Deltoid-land. And I used to know some psych-majors and, I gotta tell you, they were one strange breed in my experience:

Girl psych majors: Some hot babes, for sure. Challenge to keep a straight face and your lunch down when telling her what she wants to hear. Essential to keep a bullshit excuse at the ready with which to beat a hasty retreat from any providential tryst. Otherwise, expect hours of post-coital ennui as she unloads her life-story in which it transpires that all the men she meets are creeps. Extremely high maintenance.

Boy psych majors: Pus-baby zit-twit freak-outs. Still looking for the right girl, you know, one like dear ol’ mom, but not having much success in that department.

And the “amateur” psychologists were even weirder.

So what I’m wondering is whether the latest generation of you psych majors and amateur tag-alongs have changed any or are you still pretty much like those bozos I used to know?

If I were into psychology I would say that Mike is very insecure about his own intellectual ability and feels he has to troll blogs with petty insults detailing his own insecurities because Daddy rejected him for his smarter sibling.

You were the disingenuous jerk who’d pose as a lefty radical on campus because he thought it would score him a lot of free hippie-chick snatch. Then became a conservative to hide his humiliation after said hippie-chicks saw right through his lies, and discovering that conservative girls would go down believing any lie you tell them with dog-like worship and obedience.

So basically denialists like mike are down to calling the women sluts and making fun of the physical attirbutes of the men? That says a lot about how mature the denialists really are — and none of it is surprising.

So, mike, what do you think you’ve proved by acting like the dumbest jock in high-school?

> > What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t do thing A, and instead spend the same time and effort originally dissipated into A into doing a different thing B, which will be much more effective.

> > Do you friggin’ get it, now? Or should I draw it in crayon?

> I’m not listening to your opinion any more.

In other words, Wow, you don’t get it. Even when I’ve stated my thinking in such plain terms, you still refuse to get it, you still refuse to engage with it, instead going ‘la la la I’m not listening I have my opinion la la la’.

1. Where’s the evidence that climate scientists/campaigners received death/rape threats? I’m just a rational, civil person seeking the truth.
2. Really, if the threats really exist, that’ll be very, very shocking! But where’s the evidence that there were threats? I’m just a rational, civil person seeking the truth.
3. Yeah, the Daily Telegraph wrote a counterfactual piece that downplays the threats made against climate folks. So perhaps the climate folks are lying? I’m just a rational, civil person seeking the truth.
5. OK! OK! Maybe there were threats against climate folks, but here’s an out-of-context quote from climate scientist Ben Santer. Therefore the threats are OK! I’m just a rational, civil person seeking the truth.
6. OK! OK! Maybe Ben Santer didn’t actually make a threat! And maybe there were threats against climate folks, and these threats are wholly unacceptable! But here’s a bunch of denialist talking points! Climate has changed in the past! So maybe the death and rape threats aren’t acceptable after all! I’m just a rational, civil person seeking the truth.
7. Wait, did I say that I’d be shocked at the death and rape threats against climate folks? Look, I’m really shocked, really you need to understand how shocked I am, so shocked indeed that you can’t even see that I’m shocked and that I’m now throwing out inactivist talking points! And you’re all ALARMIZT IDIOTZ!!!! But trust me, I’m truly, truly shocked at the death and rape threats against climate folks! I’m just a rational, civil person seeking the truth.

That “artful” change was made by those opposing doing anything about AGW. From that wretched hive of Socialist villainy,* the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

It wasn’t the enviros who changed the use of this term, but rather high-powered corporate lobbying interests and their allies in Bush government and the Republican party, spearheaded by leading Republican pollster/ spinmeister Frank Luntz, who in 2002 pushed Republicans to move the public discussion away from “global warming” to “climate change.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange.

mike, the potty-training casualty returns! Yeah, I bet all those acres of putative hot babe conquests really think a lot of you in retrospect, you big manly, manipulative, stud-muffin, you! What a guy – we’re all secretly in awe of you, you know.

Sent Mirabella an email. Said it was disappointing that the opposition spokesperson for science (et al) didn’t actually speak to scientists about this issue, and that while politicians cite preferred articles as a matter of course, that it was intolerable she should do so on the matter of threats of violence and death. Asked her to speak to climate scientists about it, amend her articvle accordingly, and clarify that the Liberal party does not tolerate threats of violence and death against anyone.

“Members of the scientific community are receiving death threats as debate over Julia Gillard’s carbon tax intensifies.

In the latest incident, Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies executive director Anna-Maria Arabia received an email today saying she would be “strung-up by the neck” and killed for her promotion of mainstream climate science.

The threat was emailed to her this morning before a “Respect the Science” campaign at Parliament House in Canberra today.

It follows months of abusive phone calls and threats to several of Australia’s top scientists at the Australian National University, forcing it to improve security and shift climate scientists to a more secure work location.

Ms Arabia said she and other members of the science community received more than 1000 emails a day as part of an anti-climate change campaign, but the latest email went “a step too far”.”

In the interest of being constructive; attached a link to a wikipedia on Ice ages. For those of you a little confused about past climate, or even it would seem currently reality, this should prove informative

You know, I do believe GSW may really be that thick! He seems to genuinely imagine he’s on a winner!

All as a result of a magic synergy; combining a delicate bloom of native ignorance that Wilde would have called on us to treasure with the traditional denialist habit of not actually bothering to comprehend what your opponents say – I mean, why bother, when you know everything already?

(Smiles sweetly) GSW, what you have apparently failed to notice is that you just had the crap beaten out of you. Don’t slam the door on your way out.

GSW, tsk tsk. You seem to think that people who accept AGW as true don’t also have a good appreciation of natural climate, and especially the existence of a whole field of research called “paleoclimatology”. [Shakes head sadly]